Scrolling app: UIPageViewController vs UIScrollView

Question

I am working on an app in which there are several screens and each screen has the same layout, just different data passed in, then I want the user to be able to swipe from one screen to the next.

So far I got something working using the UIPageViewController project template using the transition style UIPageViewControllerTransitionStyleScroll. What I have done so far works ok, although its resource intensive because it instantiates a new view controller each time I swipe to a new page but I am loooking into working around that.

The thing I am concerned about is that it is not strictly a page application in the sense of ibooks so even though I am able to make it look like a scrolling app, using the transition style setting, I wonder if there is a reason why people seem to only use this template for book type apps, unless I am mistaken

Also there seems to be an alternative approach of using a UIScrollView and PageControl to do similar functionality

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/PageControl/Introduction/Intro.html

I am not sure which approach is better to solve the problem I am trying to fix, so am looking for some feedback. Each page will need to be a separate instance of a view controller as there are several elements to display on each page.

Answer 1

Using UIScrollView is much more difficult. If you're targeting iOS 6 you should almost certainly use UIPageViewController. If you're targeting iOS 5 then UIPageViewController might not be perfect because the only page transition available is "scroll" which looks like a page flip.

If you're worried about the resource usage, you can reuse view controllers.

See the WWDC 2012 session 223: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2012/223/